Toil and Trouble

Description

​​A celebration of magical women and nonbinary people in American history, from Salem to WitchTok.Meet the mystical women and nonbinary people from US history who found strength through the supernatural—and those who are still forging the way today. From the celebrity spirit mediums of the nineteenth century to contemporary activist witches hexing the patriarchy, these icons have long used magic and mysticism to seize the power they’re so often denied.
Organized around different approaches women in particular have taken to the occult over the decades—using the supernatural for political gain, seeking fame and fortune as spiritual practitioners, embracing their witchy identities, and more—this book shines a light on underappreciated magical pioneers, including:
✦ Dion Fortune, who tried to marshal a magical army against Adolf Hitler
✦ Bri Luna, the Hoodwitch, social media star and serious magical practitioner
✦ Joan Quigley, personal psychic to Nancy Reagan
✦ Marie Laveau, voodoo queen of New Orleans
✦ Elvira, queer goth sex symbol who defied the Satanic Panic
✦ And many more! Lisa Kröger is the coauthor of the Bram Stoker and Locus Award winning Monster, She Wrote. She holds a PhD in English and her short fiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance magazine and Lost Highways: Dark Fictions from the Road (Crystal Lake Publishing, 2018). She cohosts the Know Fear podcast (knowfearcast.com).
Melanie R. Anderson is the coauthor of the Bram Stoker and Locus Award winning Monster, She Wrote. She is an assistant professor of English at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. Her book Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Tennessee Press, 2013) was a winner of the 2014 South Central MLA Book Prize. She cohosts the Know Fear podcast (knowfearcast.com). In this book, you’ll meet some of the women who helped create or design occult systems and symbols, like the artist behind the most iconic tarot deck and the woman who gave the Ouija board its name—and you’ll also meet women who became professional skeptics or debunkers to hold people accountable, an important role in keeping the occult world ethical. You’ll be introduced to women who used the occult as a stepping-stone to political power, like First Lady Nancy Reagan’s personal psychic, and some who used it to find financial security. And you’ll get to know a wide array of women who have embraced labels like witch, voodoo queen, and Mistress of the Dark.
     The occult in US history takes many forms: from accusations of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England to the development of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century, to the uses of astrology and fortune-telling in the early twentieth century, to the Goddess movement of the mid-twentieth century, to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and ’90s, and to our current obsessions with psychics, occult paraphernalia, spells, and crystals. Throughout these tumultuous centuries, women have been connected to the occult by the patriarchy as a way of punishing and policing their behavior (for example, the colonial accusations of witchcraft and satanic revels), and women have grasped the occult as an opening to seize independence and power (for example, how the Spiritualist movement gave women voices to speak out about political issues).
     As we began thinking about women’s relationships with the occult and the power and backlash that can result, we realized that, while we have read a lot of supernatural fiction by women, we’ve never before delved into all the ways women have participated in the occult and been perceived by the larger society for that participation. What follows are the figures we learned about, the larger social and political issues we pondered, and the stories we want to share about how women, primarily in the United States, have related to their political and social environments through the occult. This relationship seems to ebb and flow over the centuries between cultural backlash and a search for empowerment. It’s a vast and complicated history with many twists and turns, but we are excited to lead you on this journey through the occult as it appears in American women’s lives, embodied by some of the extraordinary individuals who have designed, politicized, promoted, investigated, and embraced it. CN

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